


Bonesetting and Bloodletting

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: 12 Days of Revel, AUs, Challenges, Gen, Revolution Christmas Prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 14:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5542784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maggie Foster is a widow fleeing the shadows of her past, and she finds herself in a pirates haven run by pirate lords Matheson and Monroe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bonesetting and Bloodletting

**Author's Note:**

> Day One: Pirates

 

Back in England, with its cool, blue skies and damp, grey stone, people mocked the habits of foreigners from warmer climes. Afternoon naps were for children, and the night was for the less than respectable. In Salé - where even the damp was hot - they mocked the berranis who clung to the working day of cooler climes.

In the Republic the days started earlier and ended later, with gaps carved out of the middle for the fiercest hours of mid-day heat. It meant that sinners and solicitors had to ply their trade at the same time, but it didn’t offend anyone. A census-taker would be hard pressed to find a single respectable soul in the whole sprawling settlement.

Even the doctor had her secrets.

Maggie pulled the wrap off her head, sweaty hair falling in tangled ringlets around her shoulders, and stepped out of her dress. Back home the thin cotton would have been scandalous anywhere but the slums. Here even the light fabric was too heavy to bear on her skin. In just her shift, wooden flooring hot against her bare feet, Maggie bundled up the fresh herbs to dry and set others to steep in the kitchen.

There was a stack of letters on the scarred table she used as a desk that needed answering. Her husband’s estate required administration, and even if all England thought she’d killed him in the eyes of the law she was his widow. The boys had stopped writing - she couldn’t blame them - but the governess whose care she’d left in him had sent her updates.

It was just too damnably hot - and there was blood under her fingernails. She didn’t want to read about her children with bloody hands.

She washed up, scrubbing her hands until they stung and rinsing her hair with scented water, and then reluctantly headed over to her desk. Accounts first. Then she’d deal with her past. She tucked her leg up under her, shifting the ledger over to the middle of the desk, and set to accounting her day.

Five babies - three alive, and one mourning mother, ten cases of infection in the indentured servants that worked the fields, one broken arm, two broken legs, and a dose of fever in the docks that she worried would spread.

Someone took a boot to her door. She jumped, scraping ink over the page, and swore. Another kick rattled the door in its frame.

‘We’ve injured,’ a man snapped, voice tight to breaking. ‘Get out here _now.’_

Maggie scrambled to her feet, wiping inky hands on her shift, and grabbed her dress. ‘A minute,’ she said. ‘Hold your water.’

‘Screw your woman later. We need a leech.’

She got her dress up over her shoulders, but it was still gaping open at the bodice and her feet were bare when her visitors kicked the door open. One glance told her what they were - salt-stained leather and cotton, sword hung one side of their hip and gun on the other, lice-cropped hair, and no signs of rank.

Pirates.

‘Where is he?’ the lean, salt-fair man said, stalking into her house. ‘Dr Foster?’

‘He went to Gloucester,’ Maggie snapped. ‘If you’re looking for Monroe’s barber, he’s three streets over. Much bigger house.’

The man’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a brilliant, humourless grin. It was...unsettling - a beautiful smile with something ugly behind it.

‘I wasn’t satisfied with his services,’ the man said flatly. ‘Then he suffered an unfortunate accident.’

One of the men with him, tall and heavy through the shoulders, grunted. ‘Couldn’t have waited until he’d finished stitching for his accident either.’

The pale man held up a gloved hand, one finger extended. His cuff slid down his arm, grubby lace against a heavy, tanned forearm and a distinctive ink black tattoo.

‘Enough, Baker,’ Captain Sebastian Monroe - effective ruler of this little community of thieves and scumbags - snapped. His ice-blue eyes stayed focused on Maggie. People said he was mad, but those people hadn’t seen Bedlam. Maggie knew madness, knew the way minds broke and tried to cope. What she saw in Monroe’s eyes was a...singular focus used to patch together an essential lack. ‘Now, mistress, I require a sober doctor with steady hands - so where is Doctor Foster?’

Maggie hesitated for a second, but she had sworn an oath and she had nowhere left to run too. Snatching up her wrap, she tied her hair back from her face with quick, efficient fingers.

‘I’m Foster,’ she said. ‘I am a surgiene in good standing with the London guild. Or was. They may have revoked that now.’

‘Did you kill a patient?’

Maggie’s mouth twisted in a smell, bitter smile despite herself. ‘No, not a patient.’

His eyes hooded briefly, then he nodded. ‘Come with us. Captain Matheson has been injured, and your unfortunate colleague didn’t think he could save him. God wills, you’ll have better luck. Bring her.’

The men with him grabbed Maggie’s arms. She went limply uncooperative. ‘Wait. I need my kit, my bag, my _shoes.’_

Monroe just made an impatient noise. ‘You can use your colleague’s, Mistress. He doesn’t need it anymore. Now stir yourself, we don’t have time.’

‘I have seen his kit, Captain,’ Maggie snapped. ‘His scalpels attracted flies there was so much filth on them. It’s a wonder he saved anyone with them.’

The tall man - Baker - ducked his head. ‘Monroe, no man works well with another man’s tools.’

Monroe turned on his heel, squinting with impatience. ‘If you think she’s a man, Baker, your eyes are gone or you have been confusing whores across a continent for years.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Get her kit, get her shoes, AND DO IT QUICKLY!’

His roar cracked like a whip, the rasping voice that could be heard in the middle of a storm. Maggie tugged her arms free of their grip and scurried to collect her kit, swinging the weight of the heavy, leather and wood box over her shoulder. She scuffed her feet into her shoes, soft leather slippers sewn by locals, and let the men take her.

 

The pirates called it Independence Hall, half joke and half boast. Monroe had taken it over after he and Matheson had laid claim to the city. The Saint still owned the old city, the casbahs and the great places of worship and the tombs, but the pirates owned the areas that mattered to them. The docks, the markets...the brothels.

Baker apologised, coughing with the well-mannered awkwardness of the well-bred, as he escorted her inside. He angled his body to try and block her views of the whores with his shoulders. They were not even particularly debauched whores at the moment, just women fanning themselves and watching the pirates with big, frightened eyes.

‘I have seen whores before,’ Maggie said briskly. ‘More intimately and thoroughly than you, I would warrent. You need have no concerns for my tender sensibilities.’

For some reason, that seemed to mortify the man into spluttering. Perhaps he had never considered that whore’s had an existence outside the sheets, that they spoke to women and tradespeople and chuckled about customer’s quirks.

‘Nevertheless, it’s obvious this isn’t a fit place for a woman like you,’ he said. The polite tuck of his hand against the small of her back was thoughtless, his palm warm against her skin. ‘You clearly come from a good family.’

Maggie’s fingers dug into the strap of her bag, leaving divots in the leather. ‘Then clearly you never met them,’ she said through stiff lips. ‘What is the injury?’

He looked down at her as they climbed the stained marble steps. ‘Now who’s the patient?’

‘I prefer to focus on the wound or the ailment,’ she said. ‘There’s no moral element there.’

Except with children, of course, but she couldn’t help that weakness. Nor was it any of Baker’s concern.

‘This patient, concern yourself with,’ Baker said quietly. ‘His well being and yours are now connected.’

Maggie appreciated the attempt to be kind, she supposed, but he didn’t understand her situation. She had nothing, she lived because it was a hard habit to break rather than from any attachment. All Monroe had to threaten her with was pain, and that would simply give her the impetus she needed to...cease.

‘I will tend him to the best of my ability,’ she said quietly. ‘The same I do every whore or beggar who pays their coin. If I have my way, he’ll live. If I do not, then he’ll die.’

The sigh that eked out of Jeremy was long-suffering. ‘That’s not what Monroe wants to hear.’

He led her down a long, richly appointed corridor, all heavy velvet and glittering ornaments. Pirates guarded the door at the end, big, scarred men with more weapons than teeth. They opened the door to a dark, hot room that stank of sweat and blood.

Monroe stood at the window, downing whiskey from the bottle, and a dark, long man sweated his life away on sheets that were more red than white.

‘Musket?’ she asked, heart in her throat as she dreaded the answer.

‘Knife,’ Monroe said flatly. His eyes cut to the side, Maggie followed the direction of his gaze and found a corpse that had used to be a pretty girl. ‘She tried to gut him.’

‘He gutted her first,’ Maggie said.

Monroe took another drink from the wide mouth of the bottle, his throat working hard as he swallowed. ‘No. I did that.’

A knife to the gut wasn’t good, but it was better than a musket ball. Maggie’s father had said that the last thing a man with a musket injury needed was a good surgeon - they just extended the poor soul’s misery. Knives made a mess, but they left something behind to mend.

‘You should leave,’ she said.

The look of contempt he gave her Maggie was used to - a woman with a scalpel, a wife with a mad husband, a widow with bloody hands - but the anger behind it made her flinch.

‘I stay,’ he said flatly.

Maggie swung the kit off her shoulder and set it down, crouching next to it to flick the catch. She opened it up and took out a scalpel, the blade sharp and oiled with Venetian turpentine. Her father had sworn by it for the treatment of wounds.

‘His wound has sealed too early, it’s impeding the digestion of the injury,’ she said. ‘I will need to slice him open, then rebind the injury with salve. It will pain him, even in this state. Few wish to see their loved ones suffer so. If you interfere, then he will die. He may die anyhow.’

Monroe pushed himself off the window and stepped forwards, a bleak expression on his face. ‘I’ve killed men for talking to me like that.’

On the bed Matheson groaned and shifted, one hand lifting off the bed and then falling back again.

‘Jesu, Sebastian,’ he said. ‘Stop killing the chirurgeons, or I’ll die from leaking before they can end me.’

‘If _you_ die, they die,’ Monroe said flatly. ‘Brother…’

‘I am a Matheson,’ the man said, screwing a strained grin over his face and holding his bloody hand out to Monroe. ‘It will take more than this to kill me. As my sainted brother always said, I will live eternal since God has no use for me, and the Devil too much.’

Monroe gripped his brother’s hand and watched grimly as Maggie sliced the scabbed wound open, squeezing fresh blood for it. Some surgeons recommended cautery, but if you stop the bleeding it was best to leave the flesh unscoured. Matheson didn’t scream for long, and Maggie bound linen around his stomach and hip.

He might live. At his age, with his profession, he had survived injury before. His constitution was strong, and he was rich enough to have the opportunity to convalesce.

‘I have done all I could,’ Maggie said eventually, wiping her hands on a ragged cloth. They were shaking. They always did after surgery, and her stomach was a hot ball of sour water. ‘He may live.’

She wiped her tools and put them away, bones aching as she pushed herself to her feet.

‘Stay,’ Monroe said. Ordered. ‘When we know his fate, we _may_ know yours.

  
  
  
  



End file.
